Diary of a Chambermaid (1946, Jean Renoir)

New maid Paulette Goddard (Modern Times) gets off on the wrong foot with mistress Judith Anderson (a chambermaid herself in Rebecca) by joking with the bearded master (Reginald Owen, the 1938 Scrooge), not realizing who he is. She meets desperate maid Louise, cook Marianne, and asshole valet Joseph, and gets to work. But this place is annoying and creepy: the valet (Francis Lederer, who started out in Pandora’s Box) is after her, the mistress is dressing her up for a visit from long-lost son George (sickly, secretive Dorian Gray), and the next door neighbor (Goddard’s husband Burgess Meredith) keeps breaking the family’s windows and eating their flowers. She announces she’s quitting and the valet goes mad, announces that he’s stealing the family’s treasures, then robs and murders the neighbor while the police are having their annual parade. Weird that I’d follow up Murder a la Mod with another movie that opens with a diary and features icepick murders.

Paulette, Burgess, and squirrel:


Diary of a Chambermaid (1964, Luis Buñuel)

The French director had made an American film, then the Spanish director makes a French one. Now the maid is less headstrong, and has been hired to care for Madame’s dad, who wants to grab her leg while she wears special boots and reads to him. For Buñuel’s whole career everyone blabbered about surrealism, while he just wanted to put women’s legs on the big screen.

Everything is darker and more explicit in this version – Master Piccoli is allowed to sleep with the maids as long as he doesn’t get them pregnant, and Valet Joseph wants to open a Cherbourg cafe and pimp out the maid to soldiers. The valet is still a celebrated bird torturer, also a racist activist, whose 1934 “down with the republic” march gets the movie’s final words (while Renoir’s parade featured “vive la republique” fireworks). Instead of robbing the neighbor, he rapes and kills a local girl, the same day the old man dies. The maid works on helping the cops convict Joseph (and fails), but there’s no son to swoop in and save her from these awful men, so she ends up marrying the neighbor – no escape, no justice.

Madame in her laboratory:

Unlike the Renoir this one has no pet squirrel, but we do see a mouse, a frog, ants, a boar, a rabbit, a basket of snails. Supposedly Buñuel’s only anamorphic widescreen movie – maybe he regretted its mind-warping effect whenever he moved the camera. Starring Jeanne Moreau the year after Bay of Angels, and Master Piccoli after Contempt… Valet Joseph is also in A Quiet Place in the Country, Madame in Chabrol’s Bluebeard. Watched these on oscar night… they won no oscars, but Moreau got best actress at Karlovy Vary.

The Mirbeau novel was adapted again in France with Lea Seydoux, but directed by a notorious pedophile, so it’s both tempting and not tempting to watch. The book has the girl’s (not the neighbor’s) murder and Joseph stealing the family silver, then unlike both of these movies, the maid marries him and moves to Cherbourg. Randall Conrad in Film Quarterly compares the films, championing the Bunuel over the Renoir (which has no eroticism and a “deficiency in conception”):

At the least, Celestine is a moral witness to the bestiality of Joseph, something she tried to stop and couldn’t. But perhaps her secret attraction, her fear of it, and her individual powerlessness make her an accomplice to Joseph’s rise. In that case, Joseph’s assertion – “You and I are alike, in our souls” – takes on full meaning … [Buñuel] returned in his film to the France he left in the thirties, and created its portrait … The film has the closed structure characteristic of Buñuel: the end is a beginning. An individual’s gesture toward freedom not only fails but lays the ground for still worse oppression. The era that has begun, as the [fascist] demonstrators turn the corner and march up a street in Cherbourg, is the one we are still living in.

Mustache Man/Land Baron Francisco spots hot girl Gloria during foot-fetish church and chases her relentlessly, firing everyone in his path, breaking up her engagement with construction guy Raul, winning the girl through sheer force.

Soon he’s going off on Gloria in jealous rages, while fighting for some property he claims was stolen from his ancestors. When they meet hunky Ricardo on their honeymoon he goes insane and attacks the guy. Back home, he gets a conspiracy against his wife between her mother and servant and priest, then shoots her with blanks as a threat to stop talking. She finds Raul and flashbacks half the movie, while Francisco finally loses his mind completely in public.

I’m surprised Bunuel worked with this cinematographer again – he appears to have lit the scenes with a searchlight positioned behind the camera, so everyone has a shadow right behind them. Also surprised the letterboxd crowd hasn’t declared this and The River and Death and Archibaldo de la Cruz a trilogy since Carlos Baena plays priests in all three. Don F is best known for The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales, Gloria was an Argentine film star, and the servant was a work boss in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Simple fable of a violent vendetta town cluttered up with twenty characters and a flashback structure so it seems more complex than it is. Hunky doctor Gerardo, recovering from polio in the big city, is being challenged by Romulo to a duel back in his hometown. He explains that the men of his family and another have been killing each other for generations, each killer hiding out on a nearby island for a penance period afterwards. Gerardo goes home at his mom’s request, agrees to meet Romulo on the island but refuses to shoot him – an anti-macho softie ending as the two men hug it out.

Romulo is Friday in the Robinson Crusoe movie, the town priest also played priests in Archibaldo de la Cruz and El, and peacekeeping elder Don Nemesio plays the title role in the as-seen-on-MST3K Santa Claus.

New York is getting a Buñuel In Mexico retrospective. I wish them luck – I prefer to space these out, though after Death in the Garden and Nazarin this one’s my third of the year.

Quintin is Fernando Soler of Susana, walks out on his family after he catches his wife cheating and she hollers that their daughter isn’t his. Pretty good 20-year edit while the camera’s in a pantry, now the wife is dying and wants Q to know she was lying, while Q is off being a dangerous asshole club boss. Their daughter Marta has been raised by an abusive stepdad, she runs off to the city with her man Paco (Rubén Rojo of Brainiac), immediately runs into her dad who decides to kill Paco for some minor slight. It all gets cleared up in time, nobody dies except probably the mom, and Q is forgiven for some reason. MVPs are Q’s comic henchmen smarter than their boss: Angelito (Fernando Soto, Lupita’s brother in Illusions Travel by Streetcar) and Home Run.

Q, Angelito, Home Run, Stepdad (Roberto Meyer of at least ten Buñuels):

Happy young couple:

Q explains his philosophy:

Buñuel’s least-well dubbed movie, filmed in Mexico and spoken in French. Diamond miners and soldiers are having a showdown when a mysterious stranger wanders into town, but instead of impressing everyone with his skills a la Yojimbo he’s an asshole to everyone – this is Shark (That is the Dawn‘s doctor Georges Marchal), who needs a place to stay so he shacks up with prostitute Simone Signoret, who is beloved of miner Castin (Clouzot regular Charles Vanel).

The miners-vs-soldiers war reaches a climax in a midnight firing squad which leads to a riot. Our heroes escape (with fake priest Michel Piccoli and a mute girl: Michèle Girardon of the earliest Rohmers), getting very lost in the jungle, walking in circles. They reach the promised land, finding a crashed plane full of food and jewels along the way, rescued and rich, but Castin goes mad, throwing his diamonds in the lake and murdering everyone.

Larsen:

Politically the movie may side with the miners, but once this crew forms and heads into the jungle, Buñuel is more interested in exploring the hypocrisies that exist in every human heart. And so the priest is a fraud, the prostitute is an opportunist, and the miner loses his mind … Death in the Garden concludes with a more subversive poetic image: two figures blithely paddling across a South American lake as if they were in a Venetian gondola, when in fact a literal and spiritual wilderness surrounds them.

Getting back into Buñuel after recently rewatching Nazarin.

Kids interrupt their game of savagely throwing rocks at each other to help a collapsed woman – this is Angela, wife of slick-haired doctor Valerio. She’s desperately bored with this town, but he won’t leave his post, so sends her off alone. His buddy Sandro also has an ailing wife Magda. But while the doctor takes up with a hot new visitor named Bernadine, Sandro stands by his wife to the detriment of his work, and gets fired by shitty capitalist Gorzon, who he later murders, justifiably. The doctor, always helping people, tries to hide the killer as his wife returns home with her meddling dad, who sniffs out Sandro.

Things people are calling this film: sincere (agree), revolutionary (ehh), a study in morality (sure), anti-capitalist (yeah). IMDB Trivia points out subtle insults against other artists hidden in the visuals. Bunuel’s first French movie since L’age d’or. The Doctor had smaller parts in some major Bunuel movies, Clara starred in a couple of Antonionis I haven’t seen, the capitalist in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

About time I rewatched this. Francisco Rabal is our priest (also a monk in The Nun), and the prostitute who ruins him when he takes her in after a bloody fight is Rita Macedo of Archibaldo de la Cruz. He and Beatriz (Marga López, star of a couple Taboada movies) take a pilgrimage (aka get the hell out of town before the law catches them) and keep running into the same old people from town. Beatriz’s sinister man Pinto finds her, dwarf Ujo (Simon of the Desert‘s Jesús Fernández in his first Bunuel film) follows Andara around. I’m sure there are Bunuelian themes of repetition without escape, and of the truly religious vs. common churchgoers (and the absurdity of both).

The couple years between Buñuel’s two Mexican bus films were productive, and this is a good one – better than Illusions Travel by Streetcar, anyway.

El Bruto is an exploited slaughterhouse worker, mocked by coworkers despite his strength, hired by a local landlord to terrorize the organizing tenants into leaving an apartment complex so it can be redeveloped. I wasn’t intending to watch two collectivist worker films in a row, just a happy accident.

While fleeing from the law after terrorizing the locals, a tragic chicken murder occurs. Then Bruto busts in on Meche, the woman whose chicken (and father) he killed, falls for her and attempts to manufacture a happy ending, but his wife Maria interferes.

Bruto had major roles in a couple John Ford movies and a James Bond. The landlord’s girl Maria Juado had a good Hollywood run in at least three major westerns and Under The Volcano. Wife Maria was better known as a ballet dancer, and Meche was in The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy.

Bruto getting his orders from the landlord:

Bruto’s excuse for everything:

Bruto’s ex is enraged that he’s got a new girl:

Things end as they must, in a hail of gunfire:

Still filling in the gaps in my Buñuel viewing. A big year, with four of his movies released, and this was… certainly one of them. A couple of streetcar guys rescue a malfunctioning car but find out it’s still destined to be scrapped, so they get wasted and take it out on the town one last time, picking up passengers along the route.

Lupita, her brother Tarrajas, and Curls:

Everyone hashes out their societal problems on the bus – there’s a drunken lecture about how inflation causes poverty, and choice quotes like “too much of anything is detrimental – even efficiency.” It’s a madcap stolen-train adventure as an excuse for social commentary.

Fernando Soto (Curls) appeared in Gran Hotel (not Gran Casino), Carlos Navarro in Irving Rapper’s The Brave One, Lilia Prado in Buñuel’s Wuthering Heights. The retired company man who turns them in even though they saved his life (but the company doesn’t care) is Agustín Isunza, whose final film was Alucarda.